Forty tracks from Being Boiled on
In November 2012, Virgin issued All The Best: a 40-track, two-CD survey of The Human League from the early Fast Product years through the Dare breakthrough and the later Virgin singles. It is not a studio statement. It is a catalogue map, built so a new listener can walk from Being Boiled to Don’t You Want Me without losing the thread of Philip Oakey, Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley.
The spine of the set is still 1981. After the split that left Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh forming Heaven 17, Oakey rebuilt the League around Catherall and Sulley, then took the songs to Martin Rushent at Genetic Studios in Berkshire. Rushent rebuilt arrangements from the ground up on synthesizers and Linn drums. The Sound of the Crowd, Love Action (I Believe in Love) and Open Your Heart made the UK charts before Dare landed that October. Virgin put Don’t You Want Me out as the Christmas single; it went to UK No. 1 and topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982.
On disc one the sequencing keeps the radio hits close: Don’t You Want Me, Love Action, Mirror Man, (Keep Feeling) Fascination, Human. The mix is dry and hard on the main beats, Oakey’s baritone answering Sulley’s verse like a soap-opera argument. Disc two pulls the earlier edge back into view: Being Boiled, Empire State Human, Seconds, plus the Giorgio Moroder collab Together in Electric Dreams and mid-80s cuts like The Lebanon and Heart Like a Wheel. You hear Sheffield electronics becoming chart machinery without erasing the first chapter.
You’ve completely ruined the song.
(Philip Oakey to Martin Rushent after hearing the finished Don’t You Want Me, recalled in Sound on Sound)
That quarrel sits in the middle of the compilation. Oakey wanted a colder, lonelier finish; Rushent and Jo Callis pushed a brighter pop mix; Virgin’s Simon Draper sided with the hit. The single Oakey ranked as the weakest track on Dare became the song that defined the band worldwide. All The Best puts that contradiction next to the industrial early singles and the Jam & Lewis ballad Human, so the career reads as one long negotiation between experiment and chorus.
As a listening object the set is practical: remasters, rarer tracks, and the hits that still open club nights. It does not invent a new Human League. It files the existing one, from Fast Product severity to Genetic shine, in one place. For a band whose best work was always about how machines and voices share a record, that filing is enough.
All The Best remains a Virgin-era summary rather than a rewritten myth. Cue Don’t You Want Me and you still hear the toilet-booth vocal, the Linn snap, and the duet that Oakey nearly buried at the end of side two. The compilation’s job is simpler: keep that argument audible for whoever arrives late.
Sam W. | 8 October 2026
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Read this and finally understood why critics flipped for All The Best.
Jules M. | 8 October 2026
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Forgot how dark the middle of All The Best gets. Thanks for the reminder. Sharing this in the group chat. Expect chaos.
Nadia | 9 October 2026
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Put All The Best on while cooking. Burned the onions. Worth it. Might be recency bias but I do not care today. Replay button abused.
Tom Riff | 10 October 2026
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This is the The Human League album I lend to people. If they bounce, we talk later.
Bea | 10 October 2026
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I still play All The Best front to back. Skipping feels rude. Also the comments section on old forums was wild about this.
Ben | 11 October 2026
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Studio stories like this make All The Best feel less like a monument, more like work. Coffee got cold while I finished the article. Acceptable.
Ray | 12 October 2026
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My copy of All The Best is destroyed. Still won’t replace it. Marks are history. Coffee got cold while I finished the article. Acceptable.
Nina Bass | 13 October 2026
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Not every track is perfect but the whole of All The Best feels like a place.
Marc G. | 14 October 2026
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This is the The Human League album I lend to people. If they bounce, we talk later. More of this please.
François | 15 October 2026
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The Human League really sequenced this one right. Side B still surprises me.
Mike B. | 15 October 2026
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Put All The Best on while cooking. Burned the onions. Worth it.
Rosa | 16 October 2026
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Studio stories like this make All The Best feel less like a monument, more like work.